The present invention concerns automatic flush systems and is directed particularly to sensor apparatus that they employ.
Technological advances in recent years have made the use of automatic flushers quite popular in public facilities. Although they have been employed for both toilets and urinals, their use for urinals has been much more widely accepted than for toilets, because automatic urinal flush systems have tended to be more reliable than automatic toilet flush systems.
One reason why toilet flushers tend to be less reliable is that toilets tend to be placed in stalls. This requires the object detectors on whose operation automatic flushers are based to distinguish between actual users and stall surfaces. Although ways of making this distinction exist, they tend to be relatively complicated, costly, and inconvenient.